Monday, February 15, 2010

Ok, so I try to be the first to admit when I make a mistake... and here's a good one. I've been having weird issues on transmit with my Softrock/Mobo where if I transmit towards the center frequency with digital modes, all is well. However if I transmit in either direction, audio is off it seemed. I decided to play with WSPR tonight, and could decode stations fine, but no one could hear me and I only was heard once or twice a few weeks ago on 30m. Perplexed I start fiddling with my other rig to see where my output was, as it's a nice straight line it's easy to see what's happening, and noticed it was a lot lower than it should be. Tried three or four times, reset my Mobo settings, tried PowerSDR 1.12 and 1.9... even reloaded the Delta44 drivers. Mind you to complicate matters, around the same time I got my new SR 6.3 board and the MoBo kit, I rebuilt my ham PC, so I had quite a few variables here for troubleshooting before someone goes "Ah! The issue is pretty obvious!!!"

Finally the light went off when I was trying to see if it was the LCD offset for PowerSDR and the Mobo that was screwing it up. I was off in the exact opposite direction than where I wanted to be. Turns out when I put the Mobo and SoftRock into the case, I had used polarized connectors (good), however when I put them in, the connector was loose, so the pins came out of the plug (bad). As you can probably guess by now, I had the L/R reversed which is why if I was off center at all, I would get no where as my digital mode audio was reversed. Like magic, everything seems to work correctly now that they are lined up... OOPS!

On a side note, I ordered one of George's SR6.3 NG boards, can't wait to get it! Also ordered the SI570 chip a couple weeks ago that came in. I hope to blog about my assembly experiences here with what I find.